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Providing money, roads, education, electricity, and employment to needy people of the world is a noble idea, but it’s like putting the cart before the horse when a billion people don’t have a reliable source of safe drinking water. They are in danger of ingesting typhoid, dysentery, salmonella, diphtheria, E. coli, or cholera. Water treatment plants and long distance pipes are terribly expensive for Third World nations, and even purified water can become contaminated with disease before consumption.
A possible solution: a personal water filter for each person. Danish water purification company Vestergaard Frandsen has developed the LifeStraw® Personal, a small filter that requires no power and can be worn on a string around the neck. There are no moving parts and no maintenance is required. Sip water directly through the LifeStraw® and it removes 99% of waterborne bacteria and viruses. There are several layers inside to filter out increasingly smaller pathogens, then iodine to kill the smallest, and finally charcoal to remove the iodine taste. After use, you blow air back through the straw to clear the filters. A personal filter lasts for about a year’s use. It is not effective against the parasite Giardia lamblia, which is smaller than 5 microns, but the company is working on it.
Vestergaard Frandsen also offers the LifeStraw® Family, which can be used to clean a household water supply. The filter cleaning is just a bit more complicated than the personal filter, but still simple. The family filter should last two years.
LifeStraw® won the Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas earlier this year, among a growing list of awards and accolades. It is not available at the retail level yet, although many are interested in using it for camping or international travel. Organizations and corporations who want to set up a distribution deal can contact Vestergaard Frandsen. Hundreds of thousands of LifeStraw®s have been distributed so far, much of them shipped to victims of disasters such as the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and the recent cyclone in Burma. The cost of the personal LifeStraw® is about $3 each, which is too expensive for most of the people who need it. There’s the tragedy, since $3 is about the cost of a morning latte for most Americans.
Comments (9)
Comment
It can’t be used in salt water, can it?
posted by Jake Le Master on 5-19-2008 at 8:47 am
You can donate LifeStraws as an individual. Click on the Life Straw link and you will see a donate button on the left. A Family Lifestraw costs $15.
posted by JaneM on 5-19-2008 at 8:59 am
only $3! We need to get donating!
posted by beth on 5-19-2008 at 9:42 am
I’ve also been impressed with the development of Dean Kamen’s Slingshot and Stirling.
posted by Matt on 5-19-2008 at 9:49 am
Awesome! Way to invent something useful, life-changing, and life-bettering, Vestergaard Frandsen!
posted by kate on 5-19-2008 at 10:12 am
Wow, this is awesome! Something about drinking brown, murky water directly from a straw (even this particular straw) just doesn’t seem settling though. Bravo for the idea however!
posted by CK on 5-19-2008 at 11:36 am
They should sell them in wealthier nations for $10 (or whatever) and use the extra money to fund distribution in third-world and disaster stricken areas. There’s a company that makes very cheap personal computers for impoverished areas, and they sell to wealthier people/countries at a higher rate to fund the donations.
As a hiker/camper, I would definitely pay extra for something that’s both really useful and a good cause.
posted by gibson8or on 5-19-2008 at 12:37 pm
Wow. I never thought I would be in favor of inflated pricing, but that’s a great idea, gib.
posted by Another Beth on 5-19-2008 at 6:26 pm
I’ve been an avid reader of the Mental Floss and I also have been working directly in humanitarian aid and international development for various non-profits in sub-Sahara Africa in the water sector for many years now - I’d love to offer three thoughts.
The first is the little-known fact that that typhoid and salmonella are the same disease; just different terms for different continents.
The second is that Lifestraw is an amazing piece of technology that has saved thousands of lives and hats off to Vestergaard Frandsen for the design. It’s has amazing applications in emergency relief settings where the ability to instantly reach tens of thousands of individuals is critical for survival. The one organization I worked for purchased containers of these for tsunami relief along with millions of P&G’s PUR Sachets which are another great water purification technology for emergency relief situations.
The third thought is that people often confuse relief work with development work. Development requires sustainable solutions that can be implemented at the local level. With a one/two-year lifespan on a filter, who is going to export these and pass them out to millions of impoverished people year after year? It creates a hand-out mentality and dependency (similar to the welfare trap in the USA). In a development setting, technology should empower communities towards self-reliance. Technologies like the BioSand Filter can be built right in a community and passed on down to grandchildren. That’s sustainability, and that empowers local people with the ability to take charge of their own futures.
On the flip side, the Biosand Filter weighs 300lbs and is made from concrete… it’s not applicable to emergency relief. The lifestraw is and it’s amazing for what it accomplishes. Each has their place and but it requires knowledge of the context and understanding of the long-term consequences to determine the right technology for the right circumstances. There are lots of things that exacerbate poverty, but mostly though, poverty is about building hope and self confidence and changing perceptions of ones-self. If it were just about technology we would have solved poverty a long time ago.
posted by Barak Bruerd on 5-20-2008 at 9:57 am